Spotted: A Chat with IndieWhip

IndieWhip is a video branding agency located in Providence, Rhode Island. They make videos and f*cking love it! With a cast of talented creatives and thinkers, IndieWhip is on a journey to tell their clients stories and build personal connections along the way. So if you are looking to tell your brand’s story through video, then IndieWhip is the perfect partner for you.

Core Services: Video is our bread and butter, our entree and our desert. Live action, animation, 3D, VR, you name it. Marketing, Advertising, Non-Profit and Community based work- if it’s video, we’re doing it. After listening to the book “Traction” by Gino Wickman on a 6 hour drive from our client in Tempe, AZ, to a meeting in San Diego, we were able to refocus our original business model into a video-centric model.

# of Employees: Our roster of crew and contractors, including those that work with us in pre-production and post-production, is over 150. The company itself is only three full time employees – our founders Chandler, Paul, and Brian. At one time we had upwards of 20 in-house, full-time employees, but as we shifted our services and refocused our business model, we learned that a roster of the most talented contractors is the best way to get the best-fit team on every project we do.

# of Four-Legged Employees: We have three four-legged employees, Whiskey, George, and Levi. While they may not be able to direct or produce our videos, sometimes they certainly run the show. Our clients love these guys, and they make frequent appearances in our internal content and social media.

Company Mantra: We make video, and we f**cking love it. You will too.

Does your agency have a cool origin story?

With an undying love for working with brands via their past agency experiences, IndieWhip wanted to pair the production-house model with the agency model. The three co-founders all shared the desire to build a cool, creative company that brands of all sizes could utilize. The rest is history.

Most interesting physical thing in your office?

Our HQ is a converted, old ambulance repair shop, so we have a giant, glass garage door and a huge open floorplan that lends a lot of character to our business. Before our launch party, we thought it would be badass to have Chandler’s Harley Davidson Sportster as a decoration for the party- why not, right? It hasn’t left since. Every client tries to sit on it.

What does #agencylife mean to you?

Being an agency isn’t about how many people you are, how big your clients are, or how many awards you can win. Being an agency means you’re on the pursuit of endless creativity with the right partners. It’s not an immobile fortress, it’s a ship; one that we build together, find our stations on and sail together, pushing forward, charting out new territory as it stirs through vast, open ocean. Each client took a chance boarding our ship, and when they board, they’re not just passengers, their crew members. We work with our clients every step of the way, every league we sail. It’s not about who we are apart, it’s who we want to be together. That’s agency life.

“There are two types of customers: those who want to take risks and those who wish they did. Only one is worth working with.”

In 10 Words or Less, What We Do for Our Clients:

We take the complexity out of the video production process.

3 Characteristics We Look for in Potential Clients:

Imagination

Communication Skills

Respect

Our Clients Love Us Because:

We’re different. There’s nothing traditional about us, our process or communication, at all. We’re the “wildcard” team, often taking the road less travelled, or cutting a new trail through the forest with an axe. No two clients are ever going to be the same, so applying the same methodology to different clients won’t get us or them very far. We’re not a traditional production house and our clients respond well to that, they learn about every step of the process along the way so they know what goes into each video; why can do some things, and why other things don’t fit. We also have a collaborative agency backbone, so our client services handle much of the headaches, details, and logistics that most production companies leave to their clients, or producers.

What is the best compliment you have ever received from a client?

The best compliment is when someone genuinely says “I / We love you!”. Clients should know that a thank you, or a sign of positive emotion is what makes our world go round. When we hear this, we know that we not only did a great job, but also the right job.

Clients We’ve Helped:

We’ve helped a world-changing startup in the clean water space raise over $5 Million dollars with one tiny piece of video. We were able to help raise money to build machines that can literally produce water out of thin air. To us, that was proof that video is seriously powerful and can help shape our world and our future.

The #1 Thing We Love About Branding:

With branding in our videos we often get to articulate and communicate creativity from brands that desperately need it. Sometimes, with product based videos, we get to tell a story about an object that otherwise wouldn’t have one on it’s own. Service based videos can be different, and often have a story built right into them that we’re able to showcase in a more focused method. It feels great being able to problem solve or reach a target market by telling great stories.

What is the one branding engagement you are proudest of? Why?

The branding engagement we did for ourselves is what we are most proud of. Long (infamous) story short, a draft of a tourism video we were commissioned to create for the state of Rhode Island leaked before completion; it featured placeholder footage from Iceland. This lit the internet on fire and became global news once the video went viral. This probably could have been the end for a lot of agencies our size. Instead, we made a mockumentary for April Fools about us doing it on purpose. Once again a match was lit and the internet was set ablaze once again- this time with our name and the brand we wanted to be, all over national news. This ‘crisis-branding’ is something that we are immensely proud of because we turned a huge negative into the biggest positive ever. It was a story that was started by someone else, and by the end of it, we were the ones telling it and controlling the narrative.

If different from above, what is the most recognized branding work you have done? Tell us a bit about it.

Our most recognized work was probably the “Rhode Iceland” video and our follow up viral video. Though we’ve done nationally recognized work for Bose, Bauer, FedEx, and the NFL, our branding work for ourselves had our name right on it, and we were crowned the ‘winner of April Fools Day’ by multiple media outlets – what’s more recognizable than that?

Which one to three brands do you currently admire the most?

DirectTV: their commercials are always creative and edgy.

Netflix: incredible branding on all of their original content.

Tasty (BuzzFeed): their content and popularity is absurdly brilliant.

Which one to three brands need to be redesigned/repositioned/etc.?

Coors Light: Budweiser said, ‘you’re move’ with their latest changes…

Marvel Comics: On the brink of ultra-watered down excitement. Bring back the grittiness of the first Ironman movie!

AMC: The best television has really lacked on their marketing and branding push. We get it, Zombies are amazing, but the authenticity of their marketing during the Mad Men peak was unprecedented. Bring that attitude back!

What is one thing people don’t know about branding that they should know?

When people see video branding, like a really great commercial on TV, there were thousands of decisions to make that happen. Potentially hundreds of people involved. It’s quite daunting to think about how much work goes into 30 seconds.

Daniel is THE marketing guru at Agency Spotter. He holds a degree in Journalism from Georgia State University and has worked in the startup world ever since graduating. When Daniel isn't tearing up the marketing scene, you can usually find him playing basketball or enjoying a delicious bowl of Chipotle...

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